(no subject)

[oakenguy]

In a couple centuries, when historians look for one single news story that illustrates a deep flaw in 20th century American culture, they could do a lot worse than choose this one:

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=1297922&page=1

Here's the gist: a man called fast food restaurants posing as a police officer, and told the managers that one of their employees was a suspected thief, and needed to be strip searched. If the managers went along with that the caller would keep going, often for hours, to see how much he could make them degrade the 'suspect'. And he succeeded in getting managers to go along with this more than 70 times before he got caught.

Seventy. 7-0. And those are the ones who reported it to police.

This is one of those news stories where each new detail I read makes me feel even worse. What's it say about our culture that McDonalds has to have a special section in its employee manual specifically stating that you shouldn't stripsearch people? What's it say when the best argument a defence lawyer can come up with for her client is that he was too stupid (83 IQ, the paper faithfully relates) to realize there was something gitchy about the situation?

I think it shows that we have a bad habit of acting like sheep when we hear an authoritative voice, is what I'm afraid it says.

Comments

[ah-creator.livejournal.com]

I really agree with your take on this. I've feared for a long time that we, as a species, take the power of authority and our latent herding instincts for granted. It's just too easy -- to hide behind the anonymity of a crowd or to glom onto the nearest alpha male for safety. And I'm glad people still remember Stanley Milgram. His methods were, at the risk of being too generous, questionable. But his work revealed something that we should consider more deeply, more often: "Who the hell am I when nobody's watching?"